Music review: BBC SSO & Ethan Loch, City Halls, Glasgow

Exuding an unaffected air of confidence, pianist Ethan Loch gave ringing definition to Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2, writes Ken Walton

BBC SSO & Ethan Loch, City Halls, Glasgow ****

It’s almost two years since Ethan Loch won the keyboard category in the BBC Young Musician competition, landing him a place in the grand finals in which he performed Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2. He didn’t win the overall competition, but the judges declared: “we heard a poet tonight” – all the more remarkable when you consider that the then 18-year-old Scot has been blind since birth.

Such poetry was repeated in this, Loch’s debut with the BBC SSO, playing the same concerto. He exuded an unaffected air of confidence and composure in a performance boasting impressive finger work, bullish assertion and a penetrating right hand tone that gave ringing definition to Chopin’s lyrical invention. Interaction with the SSO, via conductor Michael Sanderling, was impressively tight.

Ethan Loch

What experience will no doubt instil – Loch debuts with the RSNO next season – is a more natural and expansive expression of his inner feelings. For there were moments in this Chopin where his rubato felt more learnt than instinctive, where rhythmic nuance didn’t quite convey the fluidity intended.

Loch, whose confidence extends to his spoken presentation, offered his cheering audience two encores: an extract from “my own Piano Concerto”, unashamedly Romantic in idiom; and an improvisation, also referencing the epoch of Rachmaninov, that tilted more towards effect than substance. He clearly has a penchant for that latter skill; it just needs some personal refinement.

Either side of the Chopin, Sanderling’s arresting enthusiasm inspired vigorous SSO responses to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man – a punchy scene-setter delivered with martial belligerence by the brass and percussion – and Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 “From the New World”, its invigorating synthesis of cheeriness and nostalgia colourfully and exuberantly captured, both by exquisite solo work and a boisterous tutti.

This programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on 19 May